Final A-130 revisions due out this summer

By Aisha Chowdhry

Mar 24, 2016

The White House official leading the long-awaited rewrite of the Office of Management and Budget A-130 circular said she hopes to release the final draft for an inter-agency review next week; putting the final public release on track for sometime this summer.

"We are nearing the end of the process," Carol Bales, a senior policy analyst at OMB, said during a March 24 presentation to the government's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board in Washington D.C.

The Circular A-130 is the overarching framework for all things related to federal information policy. It includes a wide variety of topics including acquisition, information governance, investment planning and control, workforce planning, records management, open data, privacy and security. The document has not been updated since October of 2000.

A draft was released in October 2015 for public comment. Bales noted that she and her colleagues have incorporated changes to the updated draft version, which will be sent out next week for its last inter-agency review.

There have been "significant revisions" from the 2000 IT policy document, Bales said, and over 1,200 comments were received during the review period, but OMB is now at "end of the process." Some of the organizations providing those comments include Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe and the Professional Services Council.

Bales said most of the content of the circular is "pretty much intact" since the last revision, but she highlighted some particular changes since the last draft. The guidance regarding electronic signatures, for example, has been removed from the appendix and incorporated into the main body. She also noted there have been no changes regarding Personally Identifiable Information, and that the document remains "very heavy" on security and privacy.

Democrats will vote on an appropriations package to reopen all the federal agencies shuttered during the partial shutdown, but the lack of wall funding will likely means the measure won't get a vote in the Senate.